-The Financial Express How about planting bamboo extensively along the banks of the Yamuna to sequester the carbon from Delhi’s vehicle emissions? According to the World Bank, India’s per person emission of carbon dioxide was 1,730 kg a year in 2014. Another website says this has risen to 1,900 kg in 2016. Bharathi Namby, a scientist, says it will take just five bamboo plants a year to make an Indian carbon-neutral,...

-Livemint.com Farm economist and NITI Aayog member Ramesh Chand on the urgency of agricultural market reforms to meet the target of doubling farm incomes by 2022 New Delhi: Apart from staging protests in Delhi, farmers must make themselves heard in state capitals as well to resolve issues outside the central government’s control, farm economist and NITI Aayog member Ramesh Chand said. In an interview, he spoke of the urgency of agricultural market...

-The Financial Express How can the cotton and soybean farmers of Vidarbha and Marathwada supplement their incomes so they can get out of the trap of debt and self-engineered death? That was the theme of Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s ninth edition, four-day agricultural exhibition at Nagpur, called Agrovision, to which I was invited.  A promising beginning has been made. In October last year, the National Dairy Development Board commenced operations. It...

-The Hindu At Ministerial Conference next month, will push back on ‘severe’ curbs on right to give price subsidies At the upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) highest decision-making body, India will not agree to severe restrictions on its right to give price subsidies to farmers through the Minimum Support Price (MSP) to procure grains from them for food security purposes, according to highly-placed official sources. The WTO’s Ministerial Conference is...

-The Hindu We need to revisit the credit policy with a focus on the outreach of banks and financial inclusion Since Independence, one of the primary objectives of India’s agricultural policy has been to improve farmers’ access to institutional credit and reduce their dependence on informal credit. As informal sources of credit are mostly usurious, the government has improved the flow of adequate credit through the nationalisation of commercial banks, and the...